Does anyone know how this compares to PHC? It was an ahead-of-time compiler for PHP.
Apart from that, it seems to be following a similar path, but is a little bit earlier down it. Could probably look at the code we generated and copy some of the solutions.
PHC was also designed to support eval/dynamic features by embedding the PHP interpreter and optimizing around it. Not sure that this implementation is going down that path, which has upsides and downsides, the upside being that eval can be handled. Would be interested to see what he ends up doing.
When I looked into it, it wasn't so much eval as dynamic includes, often used for localization:
$lang = "en";
include("l18n/$lang.php");